If you look at the very tail end of the Pentagon Papers, for example, the part that deals with the weeks after the Tet Offensive, the top American military brass said that they were concerned about sending more troops to Vietnam, because they were afraid they wouldn’t have enough troops left over for what they called “civil disorder control” at hom

Back in the 1920s, the major manual of the public relations industry actually was titled Propaganda (in those days, people were a little bit more honest). It opens saying something like this: the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is a central feature of a democratic system—the wording is virtu

The peace movement made it impossible to declare a national mobilization around the war—there was just too much dissidence and disruption, they couldn’t do what was done during the Second World War, for example, when the whole population was mobilized around the war. See, if they could have gotten the population mobilized like that, then the Vietna

What Ed Herman and I called the “Propaganda Model” in our book on the media [Manufacturing Consent] is really just a kind of truism—it just says that you’d expect institutions to work in their own interests, because if they didn’t they wouldn’t be able to function for very long. So I think that the “Propaganda Model” is primarily useful just as a t

See, you happened to have picked an issue where the business community is split, and therefore the press will present “both sides.” But try to start doing something that undermines all business interests as such—you will quickly find that you’re not a journalist anymore. I mean, they may be willing to keep you on as a maverick just for the fun of i

Or take the My Lai massacre [the March 1968 shooting of 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by an American Army unit], which became a big issue in the United States. When? My Lai became a big issue in November 1969—that’s a year and a half after the killings took place, and about a year and a half after corporate America had turned against the war. An

You want to overthrow a government, who’s going to overthrow it for you? Well, the military, they’re the guys who overthrow governments. In fact, that’s the main reason for giving military aid and training all around the world in the first place, to keep contacts with our guys in the place that counts, the army.

There’s a point here to be made about government secrecy, actually: government secrecy is not for security reasons, overwhelmingly—it’s just to prevent the population here from knowing what’s going on.

What’s called “Communism” is supposed to be “the far left”: in my view, it’s the far right, basically indistinguishable from fascism. These guys that everybody calls “conservative,” any conservative would turn over in their grave at the sight of them—they’re extreme statists, they’re not “conservative” in any traditional meaning of the word.